Very sad news, this. I also remember him quite well.
Digging around the Internet, I see that Russell Coughlin signed as a full-time pro at City in the summer of 1978 and was sold to Blackburn in March 1979. I guess that means he'll have arrived to start his two-year apprenticeship in 1976.
I was only just coming up to 10 years old when he left the club, but my old man used to take me to the reserves regularly then on Saturday afternoons when the first team were away. Though he never made a senior appearance for City, he became a regular in the reserves. IIRC, he managed that while he was still a youth player and he broke into the reserve side that became City's first ever Central League winning team in 1977/8.
Colin Bell, coming back from injury, played for the first half of the season before being restored to the senior side, while Keith MacRae was in goal, Palmer and Dave Bennett featured regularly, Mike Doyle often played (he'd lost his senior place to Tommy Booth) and fringe players such as Tony Henry and Gerard Keegan played week in, week out. With only one sub in league games then, you'd also get established first-team players being given a run out if they were dropped or when they were coming back from injury. I don't remember Coughlin looking overawed in that company, and some of the reserve watchers who sat round us thought he had a chance of making our senior side.
I remember him as quite small but very tenacious; however, he was also a decent passer. The timing of his departure, a couple of months after Malcolm Allison's return, suggests to me that Malcolm didn't fancy him. Maybe that was right and he fell just slightly short of being good enough for the top flight, as he never got back to a club at that level after leaving us. Still, he had a very decent professional career for nearly 20 years and played almost 600 league games. He made over 100 league appearances for four different clubs (Carlisle, Plymouth, Blackpool and Swansea) and seems from the tributes I've read to have been well liked at every club he served.
As stated above, 56 is no age. RIP.
